The Georgia Institute of Technology ran a fairly interesting research project which determined that almost 25% of all tweets contain false information. Research staff parsed over 1% of all messages sent on Twitter for a period of 96 days and in the end over 60-million tweets were recording. Once the tweets were analyzed and fact-checked it turned out that one in four tweets mentioned false information or offered inaccuracies. All the compiled results were added to the CREDBANK database, according to which it turns out that Ebola Zombie Virus was the biggest hoax over the course of the last year.
Wondering how exactly the Georgia Institute of Technology accomplished all this? Well the 60-million tweets that were recorded were sorted for spam and categorized via various computer algorithms. Then the organized tweets were sent out to real live humans via Mechanical Turk – a crowdsourcing site. The tweets were then rated and ranked based on accuracy and certainty.
Lead researchers Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert have made the database, called CREDBANK, publicly available so that others can collaborate and tweak its judgement for use in apps.
In the meantime here are some great fake tweets to entertain you:
